I85PREP
⌘ K
F5-CA study materials
F5-CA study resources

F5-CA: Administration

F5-CA · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

All guide sections

Administration

The Administration domain tests how well you run a BIG-IP day to day: licensing and provisioning, role-based access, backup and restore, device service clustering (DSC), software upgrades, and the tmsh and iControl REST tooling behind them. Questions are practical - a broken config sync, a failed restore, a permissions complaint - and ask for the next diagnostic step or the correct command.

Core rules

  • A module must be licensed and provisioned before it appears in the GUI or tmsh. The pattern is tmsh modify sys provision ltm level nominal; the dedicated level reserves the most resources for that module.
  • Access is role-based and partition-aware. Administrator sees everything; Resource Administrator manages objects but not user accounts; Auditor is read-only including logs; Operator can enable or disable pool members and run runbooks but cannot change configuration.
  • A UCS archive is a full configuration backup. An SCF is the plain-text configuration. Restore a UCS only to the same software version and, ideally, the same platform type.
  • DSC requires device trust built on certificates, synchronized clocks through NTP, and matching device-group membership. A sync-failover group syncs configuration and allows traffic groups to fail over; a sync-only group syncs configuration without moving traffic groups.

Worked example

A replacement device joins a two-member sync-failover group but the GUI shows "Changes Pending." Start with tmsh show cm sync-status. If it reports a certificate or trust error, re-establish device trust with tmsh modify cm trust-domain ...; if the clocks differ, fix NTP first, because certificate validation and sync both fail on skew. Then confirm tmsh list cm device-group shows both members and run tmsh run cm config-sync to-group <name>. Test traffic-group failover only after the sync completes, not before.

Traps that cost marks

Restoring a UCS across software versions; making configuration changes on the standby, where the next sync can overwrite them; forgetting that BIG-IP VE throughput is licensed, so a lab VE will not behave like a production appliance; and treating a qkview as a configuration backup when it is diagnostic data intended for iHealth.